Here we are with the statistics from the Cyber Attack Timeline for the first half of July 2012. The sample included 39 attacks which have been analyzed according the three familiar parameters: Motivations behind attacks, Distribution of attacks techniques and Distribution of targets.

As far as Motivations Behind Attacks are concerned, the first two weeks of July confirmed the trend of the last months: Cybercrime ranked at number one with nearly the 70% of the occurrences, well ahead hacktivism, at number two with the 23%. Cyber Warfare and Cyber Espionage are well behind with respectively the 5% and 3% of the attacks.

The Distribution Of Attack Techniques has shown, for the first half of July, a considerable number of attacks of unknown origin. As a matter of fact, in more than one half of the occurrences (53%) it has not been possible to track the attack technique used by cyber croockers, at least according to the available information. In all those cases in which it has been possible to track the attacks, the first half of July has seen an overtake of DDoS (18%) against SQL Injection (13%), although if one sums the total occurrences of SQL Injections (certain and claimed, the latter are characterized by a question mark in the chart), the total of SQLi is a remarkable 21%, slightly greater than DDoS). I had to modify this chart after I came across an article indicating an SQL Injection attack as the vector of the breach suffered by Nvidia.

The Distribution of Targets chart confirms the Industry at rank number one with the 38% of occurrences. In any case, if we do not consider the fragmentation of this category (I have dedicated an apposite chart to drill it down), Governments have confirmed to be the most vulnerable targets with the 10% of the occurrences, corresponding to the most vulnerable single category.

Amongst the single categories, Law Enforcement Agencies rank at number two with the 8% of occurrences, followed by Education targets, online forums and political organizations, each one of them with the 5% of occurrences.

Again, please notice that data must be taken very carefully since they do refer only to discovered attacks (the so-called tip of the iceberg), and hence do not pretend to be exhaustive but only aim to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape” of the considered period. Moreover, remember that the most dangerous threats are the invisible ones.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).